2014: a year of Gabby Young, Heavy Metal and Frozen

What was your favourite music of the year? I thought I’d take a data-driven look at my listening habits, by downloading my last.fm data. I’ve found 3 interesting stories:

My favourite album: Gabby Young and Other Animals

Click for bigger version

We saw Gabby Young at the excellent Just-So festival. What knocks me out is the enjoyment in her show and her recorded music. There is such joy in the recording that you can’t help but get carried away. Her voice is exquisite and carries me away.

Two things the data told me:

I had a crazy week in November when I listened to over 200 Gabby Young tracks.

The tracks I most listened to are I’ve Improved and Fear Of Flying. Here’s the videos:

Heavy Metal

In any given week I’ll be listening to classical, or pop, or even deep filthstep but one thread that has been consistent through my life is heavy metal. You can’t beat a good scream and thrash every now and then. My top metal bands of the year are below.

Click for bigger

Conclusions?

Metallica remain the band I go back to the most. Check out that huge spike in August – 66 listens in one month. What’s interesting is that I got a little bit reobsessed with Anthrax in the same month – over 100 listens in one month. That was all about “Sounds of White Noise” – a favourite album from the 1990s and rediscovered and obsessed over in the Summer.

Meshuggah and Hatebreed make their appearance too as they were the only non-festival gigs I went to this year. Also the first heavy metal shows for, um, 20 years, I think.

First of all, they released a great new album. I listened to it a lot when it came out in October.

The second reason is the spike in May. At this stage, we’d listened to so much Frozen I wanted to reset my kid’s music tastes! We listened to The Wall a lot – the kids like the talking voices. Here’s the same chart, highlighting Pink Floyd:

Click for bigger

What did you listen to?

To make these charts, I scrobble all my music listens to last.fm. I then use Ben Foxall’s (@benjaminbenben) LastfmToCsv service to download all my data. Finally – I point Tableau to the data and explore away.